


Four Times Fitz Didn’t Button His Shirt (And One Time He Didn’t Need To)

by Sharksdontsleep



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Swearing, implied threesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-18
Updated: 2014-11-18
Packaged: 2018-02-26 02:59:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2635523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sharksdontsleep/pseuds/Sharksdontsleep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four times Leo Fitz didn't button his shirt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Four Times Fitz Didn’t Button His Shirt (And One Time He Didn’t Need To)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [joatamon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/joatamon/gifts).



1.  
His hands won’t listen to his brain. They - they shake, like his voice does.

It’s not the first time he’d experienced that disconnect; going to university at an absurdly young age had the confluence of too many good-looking girls (and boys, and occasionally well-formed robots) and unfortunately timed erections. Thank goodness for long, dull lectures, and being able to recite the entire lanthanide series.

His field assessments: The only tests he’d ever failed, ever come close to failing, and he’d given up five minutes into it, yanked the headgear measuring his VO2 max off his head, threw up into a trashcan, and declared he was going back to the lab. Jemma hadn’t fared much better, really, couldn’t stop her instinctive flinch when she’d had to shoot a human-shaped target. He wonders if she’d still flinch, now.

Now, it’s that he can’t will his hands to stop shaking. The buttons on his shirt feel miniscule, beyond the limits of human dexterity; his tie is impossible, and he yanks it from around his neck, deposits it in the laundry, even if it will come back a wrinkled mess.

He can ask - he could ask any of them, really, for help but he knows the look they’d give him, deep pity. Mostly he just pulls on jumpers and doesn’t bother to brush his hair.

Jemma barely does him the courtesy of telling him he looks terrible. Back, _before_ , she’d run a hand through his hair, tell him he looked like he combed it with a porkchop, laugh at his attempts to bring it under some semblance of control.

"You look well today," she says, instead.

"About as good as I feel," he says, giving a tight smile.

 

2.  
"Jemma, I was -" He’s half dressed, jeans on, but shirt-tails hanging out, trying to button his shirt, drink a cup of - wow, now afternoon, and he’d been up for so long that it feels like morning even if it isn’t - coffee and complete one last whack at this data set before class.

He stops, though, when he notices how red her eyes are. “You’ve been -” he says, but doesn’t finish, pulling her into a hug. She leaves damp spots on his shirt front, but that doesn’t matter. His hand is in her hair, and somehow they end up on his bed, Jemma sprawled across him, wiping her eyes on his undershirt and making such small sad noises that he would build her several doomsday devices and a new spec to get her to stop.

"Thank you," she says, a long time after. She blows her nose loudly into a tissue and watches as he strips off his shirt and undershirt, as he rifles through his clothing pile hoping to find something clean, dry, and not in need of an iron.

"Can I stay here for a while?" she says.

Class is pretty much done for, but he has lab after.

When he comes back, she’s wearing his discarded shirt, pulling across her chest and misbuttoned, sleeping inelegantly in his bed, mouth open and drooling on the pillow.

The shirt he’s wearing is too big, a Christmas gift from several years ago when there was the hope he would broaden and grow into it. It doesn’t explain the tightness in his chest when he sees her.

 

3.  
"You could button them all at once," Mack says. "Laundry day. Then just pull them over and do the top one."

It’s not bad advice; it’s not.

"OK, Fitz, you can do this," he says. Mind-Jemma agrees, giving him a hopeful thumbs up as he tackles the first set. He can hold his thumb and forefinger steady enough, but the buttons are little slippery things, the hole always seemingly too small, and he gets one only after a solid minute of effort.

Sweat sprouts on his forehead and lower back, under his arms. “Another,” he says, like he’s talking himself into a rep at PT. This one is easier, his fingers acquiescing to his mind for once, and the button pushes through with relative ease.

It’s embarrassing to throw his hands up in victory, to cheer, but he does it anyway, like he would after solving a particularly difficult dynamics problem or beating Jemma at Scrabble.

It proves a mistake, though, because the next two buttons take all of his concentration, enough that he has to try the second one four times before it slides into place. At the fifth button, his left hand shakes so much that he ends up hitting it, hard enough to hurt, against his bedframe. “Fuck,” he says, cradling it in his right hand. “Fuck.”

"Perhaps that’s enough for now," Mind-Jemma says. "You did well," and it’s a problem when he’s beginning to resent his subconscious for being condescending.

"Try this," Mack says, next time he sees Fitz. He hands him what looks like a dowel with a wire loop at the end. "Helps with some of the fine motor stuff." He wiggles his fingers. "Big hand problems, you know?"

In his bunk, it’s easier - not easy, but easier, to thread the wire loop through a button hole, hook the button, and pull. He does a few that way before his hands reject even that task. He doesn’t return the loop, though, and Mack doesn’t say anything when he arrives at the lab in a jumper and no button-up the next day.

 

4.  
"Heist time," Mack says. "Let’s go get us a body."

"Seize the dead," Fitz says.

Mack must notice he’s looking a little green at the edges, though. “She’s gonna be a corpsicle,” he says. “They keep those places ice cold. No smells.”

"Is this not your first body-napping?"

"Get Hunter drunk and I’m sure he’ll tell you all about it." He pulls a little tin of lip balm from his pocket. "Some of this should help in case -" and he dabs some on his thumb, then on Fitz’s upper lip before Fitz can object.

It smells like mentholated rub, like being sick when he was young, when the winter would crawl into his chest and wouldn’t leave for several months, the time spent in his room reading and building and imagining a world beyond, the fantastic adventures he would have. If only he’d known.

"Thanks," he says, belatedly.

"Your shirt," Mack says, still in Fitz’s space, "some of the buttons."

His collar button is buttoned into the wrong hole, his shirt puckering out a little. He’d done his best that morning, he had, but his hands were having a bad day, his brain as well, and he just shrugs.

"You mind if I -" Mack says, fingers around the loop, leaning until they’re nearly eye-level.

"Please," Fitz says, breath hitching. It feels too close and not close enough, like he could

He’s quick at it, or quicker than Fitz is, anyway, unbuttoning one button, tugging Fitz’s shirt until it hangs right, then re-buttoning. “There,” he says, running a hand over Fitz’s shirt. “Looking sharp, Turbo.”

His hand stretches across most of Fitz’s chest, and he doesn’t move it for a beat too long for it to be anything but -

"Ready to go ‘borrow’ a body?" Coulson says, coming in, tone a bit too cheerful, given their task.

Mack jumps away, like they’ve been caught doing something. “No problem,” he says. “My man Fitz here is gonna help me with the heavy lifting.”

"Yeah, I, um, -" Fitz says. And for once being at a loss for words isn’t about his aphasia.

 

5.  
He might just be slightly drunk. It’s a good drunk, a tipsy, face flushed, kind of horny sort of drunk. It helps that he could twist the cap off his beer, his and Jemma’s and Mack’s and Skye’s and everyone who’d asked, until he became the unofficial party bartender, drinking and crowing about his hands’ new-found ability to listen to him, for once. They might not tomorrow, or even later that night, but they are now, and it’s enough that he untwists the cap off a beer for May with a flourish.

"Nice," she says, laughing when it foams up over his hand. He seals his mouth over it to stop it gushing all over her.

"Guess this one’s mine," he says, somewhat sheepishly.

"That one, and those other three," May says, pointing to the empties behind him. She’s smiling at him, though, smiling even more when Coulson comes over and asks if she wants to dance to whatever weird music Skye picked out.

"Absolutely not," she says, but she’s already kicking her shoes off.

"You’re drunk, Fitz," Jemma says, coming over a minute later.

"So are you, Simmons," he says. "I think Mack’s drunk too." He’s sitting over on the couch, seemingly listening to whatever ridiculous story Hunter is telling, but shooting looks Fitz’s way. He’s still in his shirt from the Garage, sleeveless and smeared with grease.

"He is," Jemma says. "He looks - um." She makes a hand movement that indicates her approval of his appearance.

"He does," Fitz says, face going slightly hotter.

"I was thinking of inviting him back to my bunk," Jemma says, leaning over the whisper conspiratorially in Fitz’s ear. "We hardly know one another. Seems like a good time to do some ‘team building exercises.’" She’s drunk enough to do the bunny ear quotation mark things he hates with her fingers.

"Oh," Fitz says, biting his lip. "Um, if you think he’d be up for that."

"I asked," she says. "He’s up for it. Very up." She actually winks.

The beer is beginning to churn in Fitz’s stomach. It might be time to switch to something more prudent. Like whiskey. “Well,” he says. “Have fun, I guess.”

She gives him an odd look. “You’re not coming too?”

His stomach drops, in the best way possible. “Uh,” he says.

"C’mon," she says, and leads him by the hand the way she does when she has results he has to see, right that minute.

Mack must have seen them leave, because he’s waiting outside Jemma’s room, looking, well, Fitz doesn’t know the word for it. Anticipatory, maybe. Hot. He doesn’t have time to think about it, though, since Jemma pushes him inside, begins working at the buttons on his shirt.

Mack steps behind him, and breathes a, “OK by you, man?” into his ear before bypassing the buttons and going to pull his shirts untucked from his jeans.

"Yes," he says. "Very OK."

"Good," Jemma says, with an air of finality. "Glad that’s settled."

In the morning, Jemma brings them coffee. She’s wearing his shirt, misbuttoned in the front. She bats his hand away, laughing, when he goes to fix it.


End file.
